[Talk-us] Talk-us Digest, Vol 102, Issue 13

[Mike Thompson]

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 2:45 PM, OSM Volunteer stevea <
steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:

> On 8/19/2015 2:29 AM, Nathan Mixter wrote:
>
> I would like to see areas in OSM categorized as either land use, land
> cover (which we call natural for the most part in OSM) or administrative to
> clear the confusion. I am also in favor of eliminating the landuse=forest
> tag at least in its current incarnation and switching any official forested
> areas to boundary tags.
>
> I think most of us would agree that having trees across an area with few
> or no trees looks weird. Yes, I know - don't tag for the render, blah blah.
> But it seems like it would make sense if we kept wood and forest areas
> separate. Since natural=wood and landuse=forest virtually render the same
> now, they should be treated differently than they are currently.
>
>
> Thank you for chiming in, Nathan.
>
> Paul Norman <penorman at mac.com> replies:
>
> As this isn't US specific, you should probably raise this on the tagging
> list.
>
> One of the few areas of forest tagging where there is consensus is that a
> US "National Forest" does not get a landuse=forest tag. Fortunately, we're
> getting towards having fixed up many areas in the US where this was made.
> Beyond that, there are many opinions on where to use natural=wood and where
> to use landuse=forest, none of which are universal. This is why
> OpenStreetMap Carto renders natural=wood the same as landuse=forest. It's
> also intentional that trees are present on the rendering everywhere that
> one of these is tagged.
>
>
> And this last part, I believe, is the source of at least part of the
> confusion.  My reading of the wiki for the many years I have been an OSM
> contributor (most of the history of this project) is that:
>
> natural=wood is used for what is sometimes called “primeval forest.”  That
> is, a natural area of largely/mostly trees which have not been cut down
> (ever, or for a very long time) and are not going to be cut down,
>
1) I don't know how anyone would able to tell this from simple on the
ground observation.
2) While the English word "natural" might suggest this, we use "natural"
for other things that man has a hand in creating or modifying, e.g.
natural=water for a man made reservoir.

>
>
> And Paul, I still believe it would be proper to tag those areas inside of
> US National Forests which ARE actually forested to have a tag of
> landuse=forest.  After all, the US Forest Service (who administers them for
> all Americans, their owner) is part of the US Department of Agriculture,
> and more often than not (I agree, not in wilderness areas found inside of
> USFS lands) I CAN harvest downed wood there (to make a fire when safe to do
> so, for example) and that most certainly qualifies as me harvesting timber
> in my forest lands.
>
By this definition almost any treed piece of land could be tagged as
landuse=forest, including many urban areas that have trees. I suggest only
if there is, or reasonably could be, a commercial use for the forestry
products being produced/harvested, should we tag landuse=forest.

Mike


>
>
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